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| Name |
Coruzzi, Gloria M. |
| Location
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New York University |
| Primary Field
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Plant Biology |
| Secondary Field
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Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences |
 Election Citation
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Coruzzi pioneered studies of plant systems biology, opened up the field of clock nutrient regulation, and discovered the new concept of "nitrogen economics."
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Research Interests
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Gloria Coruzzi's research in plant systems biology resides in Pasteur's Quadrant-the scientific space where investigations of basic processes aim ultimately to be beneficial to society. To this end, the overarching contribution of her research has been to develop systems biology approaches to predictively model and experimentally validate how internal and external perturbations affect processes, pathways and networks controlling plant metabolism, growth, development and field outcomes. Specifically, her systems biology studies have enabled her laboratory to predictively model and validate high throughput the gene regulatory networks that control nitrogen-use efficiency (NUE), a trait that impacts the environment, energy and human nutrition. Her current studies exploit time - the 4th and largely unexplored dimension of transcriptional networks - to capture transient interactions between transcription factors and their genome-wide targets, and to accurately forecast network states at future time-points, a major goal of the systems biology community at large. Importantly, her lab's studies in the model plant Arabidopsis bridge bench-to-field work and have uncovered gene networks associated with enhanced nitrogen use in crops including maize and rice. Finally, to further exploit plant genome diversity for practical progress, her lab - in collaboration with colleagues at the New York Botanical Garden, the American Museum of Natural History, the Cold Spring Harbor labs and the Courant Institute - has developed a functional phylogenomic pipeline that can identify specific genes associated with the evolution of key agronomic traits across the seed plants. To enable such systems biology studies more broadly, her lab has developed and embodied various tools for network analysis into a software platform (www.virtualplant.org) that is available and widely used by the plant community to identify the networks underlying numerous biological processes and pathways underlying plant growth and development. |
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